New Blog Site

I'm putting this blog in mothballs. I've moved to a shiny new site at:

http://80proofprose.blogspot.com/

Hope to see you there.

Richard

Last Man Standing

I sadly spend my writing time working on Sunder or procrastinating. I enjoy the challenge of flash fiction but rarely put my mind to it. One of the writing websites I frequent has a weekly flash fiction exercise which caught my eye this week. 200-600 word range. I went a few words over but I let it pass as it's not a contest except for bragging rights. I would have liked another 100.
Credit to Critique Circle

Prompt:
A massive plague has killed everyone on earth, as far as you know except for yourself because of some unknown immunity. What are you going to do? Are you going to try to look for survivors? Remember, there is no one out there to help you.

Since this shares similar elements with Sunder, I thought it would be fun to take a completely different approach to the theme.

Darrel dashed across the avenue to crouch behind a bus stop bench. Although the dogs growled among themselves over the corpse's jerky covered bones, he knew from experience they preferred fresh meat. He, himself, was so hungry he could eat a dog. Over the next hour, he crept through the city streets, jumping whenever a gust of wind disturbed the debris littering the pavement. The weeks of solitude had stretched his nerves thin. It did not help that he had not eaten since his provisions ran out six days past. To continue on, he needed food. More than food, he needed a drink. A stiff one. Up ahead, a neon sign jutting from a row of buildings grabbed his attention. Vic's Place. The name carried an air of sweaty vinyl bar stools and cigar smoke. Darrel kept his expectations in check. Like the dozens of bars he had stumbled across over the last week, this one was certain to disappoint. If not closed due to the plague, the bartender would be either dead or cheating his employer with an extended break. Back at the first bar Darrel had found open, he had waited patiently for a drink amid the stench of rotting corpses for six long hours. The bartender had remained out of sight until Darrel gave up and moved on. Darrel learned his lesson and, after visiting three more bars, he made it his policy to wait no longer than an hour for any bartender to offer him service. Obviously the plague was having deleterious effects on people's work ethics as Darrel had suffered the identical neglect in each of the subsequent bars and markets he attempted to patronize. Despite his run of bad luck, a tinge of hope sparked within him at the open sign in the bar window. Darrel pushed the door ajar and peeked inside. The bartender was nowhere in sight and the room reeked of spoiled meat. A dozen rats scattered from three crumpled corpses as he stepped inside. Broken glass and several overturned stools lay on the floor. Not a good sign. A decent bartender would never keep such an untidy bar. Darrel seated himself at the bar and scanned the rows of liquor bottles lining the serving station wall. Scavenging his pockets, he brought forth the last coins to his name. One seventy-eight. He gazed down at the rotting patrons. None of them would be offering to buy him a drink; of that he was certain. He doubted his chances of credit to be good as well. He rose up on the foot rail and peered over the bar. Nothing. No dead bartender lay there. Proof of another employee's dereliction of duty. Darrel steamed at the poor service. It would serve the bartender right if he helped himself to a drink and left without paying. The owner could take the money out of the bartender’s wages for all he cared. Darrel slipped behind the bar to choose his poison. Since the bartender was buying, why not have something special. He selected a sixteen year old Bushmills scotch whiskey and set it on the bar. After staring at the bottle for a minute, he placed it back on the shelf. It would be just his luck to be caught and accused of stealing. A radio sat at the end of the shelf. He switched it on and dialed through the static to the channel he knew by heart. “...sees no end in sight as the death toll continues to rise. Now back to the mellow sounds of K-Tunes.” Darrel smiled. They were still sending him their message. Although the message never varied, it was all the proof he needed that there were people out there besides the useless bartenders and clerks. He would find the K-Tune folk eventually, if he didn't die of thirst before hand.

A Cheap Ripoff of a 2YN Post

 This following works best when read by John Cleese.

Although it's been many long years since my last post, I am most assuredly one who never gives up. As is my want in life, "never say die" is my unwavering motto. Unless, of course, you're actually dieing from a severerd jugular or something. I mean it would be pretty asinine to say "Never say die," to someone whose blood is gushing all over the upholstery and walls and everything, now wouldn't it?

Deep breath,,, There we go. Now where was I? Oh yes, ... Sunder.

When I started the finale for Sunder's second world, I felt hopeless. It seemed absolutely imposible that I  could deliver what was required due to all the previous chapter's promises. I humbly admit, I feared ithe entire climax would turn out something like this: The heroes snuck inside the store and were attacked by bad zombies who aren't really zombies at all but look and smelled like real zombies. They fought really really hard and kill all the zombies. Plus some really fat zombie rats that leak stuff all over the place. And then they got saved. The end.

Fortunately, the conclusion went better than expected. It turned into two chapters of 4k words each which are  exceedingly long chapters for such rubbish.. On top of it all, it ended in a way that will allow yours truely to skip directly to the chase and finish up this world in one or two chapters more. That's one or two chapters less than I originally though necessary. In my book, that is a very very very good thing.


And one other thing...

God, I am so looking forward to leaving this world (the fictional one) so I can deal with the more mainstream subjects of cannibalism and mad scientism in the next. You are what you eat, after all.

If you find a moment, please pray for me.

Dancing a Jig Across the Parallel Universes

It's been a while since my last post. That's due to Sunder's slow progress. Nothing has seemed worthy of a post.

Until today. Today, Sunder begins to make sense.

From Sunder's conception, the logic behind the plot was blatantly weak. I continued on, however, in the expectation that things would work themselves out before the end. Today, some biggies fell into place.

I was aware that the entire world portal system was much too complicated to work well in a simple story. The main problem was devising an explanation for why the kidnappers have to travel across all the parallel words to return with the child, when no such detours plagued them when they traveled to the child's world. This and a few other significant problems all centered around the subterranean portal system that, if not answered satisfactorily, wound topple the entire story. Eureka! or Shazam, or whatever it is writers shout. The answer is so simple (as you would expect) and came with an added major plot bonus. I now know how the crystal and shard play the key roll in the plot's resolution. Two birds with one stone! 

I know now that I am on the right track and believe the ending of the tale, which is undetermined as yet, to be on far more solid footing. How do you know when a solution is correct? When in retrospect you can't believe it took you so long to see what was right in front of your nose.

Post-Part-One Depression

Following the conclusion of part one, I found myself disinterested in part two and have struggled over the last few weeks to find some motivation to begin writing again on a regular basis. Having "Pirates of the Burning Sea", one of my past favorite online games, go to a free to play status at the same time didn't help me get much writing done either.

The break, however, seems to have done me some good, and now that I've done a fair amount of plundering and pillaging, I'm back to writing every day.(as life permits) Clay and Mark have even had their first zombie encounter. There's nothing like the rotting living dead to get the juices flowing.

Point of No Return

I had not noticed that last week I'd reached the half way mark of my original 90,000 word projection. Having arrived at the 46,000 word mark, I'm as far from the end of the story as to the beginning. If I'm going to run out of fuel, it might as well be near the finish than somewhere along the trail heading back to the start. Then again, this logic might not apply as well to writing as it does to flying. No matter, I'd still rather crash and burn near the end than the beginning. (This entire issue is mute as my reassessed word projection is 120,000 words.)

"Part One is up 'n done," says I, wiping me bloody hams of the whole sodding mess.

(Would you believe I'm presently reading Treasure Island)

And there it is, lock, stock, and barrel, the whole bloody mess that is part one of Sunder, my literary tribute to the B-Movie genre. (This means that I have finished the first draft of part one.)

The ending of part one presented me with the closest thing I've ever known to writer's block. In this last chapter, all I needed was to find the portal to the next world and zap, let them port and be done with it. So why did it take me so many days to write a measly 2,440 words? Because the ending needed some sort of kick in the pants. By this point in the story, my readers (should I ever acquire some) as well as myself, would be sick of the damn hell trees. I needed to spice things up, so even though there was one last battle with the forces of darkness, I glossed over the final hell tree encounter and moved quickly on to the cave portal.

And there I became stuck. I was standing on the precipice of completion. All I had to do was end the thing.

The problem was that everything leading up to this point made it impossible to just say they found the portal and vanished. There had to be a problem. That, it turned out, was a problem for me.

Clay is standing before the portal with Mark.It's only a few feet away. Where am I going to come up with a conflict at this point? Is it time to bring in the machine gun toting naked women as suggested by course instructor, Zette? No, I want to save the naked women for later.

So for days, I half heartedly stabbed at the chapter hoping an idea would come before I lost patience and just had them port with the ease of turning on the TV. A solution did come, of course, and it was so simple I didn't even realize I had found it until I had finished writing it. I had even mentioned the problem earlier on but had overlooked it's potential. The solution, as I said, was simple. If you came upon a pile of stones you suspected of being a portal to another world, how would you go about triggering it? And there you go, a perfect little dilemma to frustrate the boys before they can port to Part Two.

I can now say the first draft of Part One is complete.

It's now time to move on to the more funner stuff: ZOMBIES.